Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  “I’m not sure. She’s calling the Durbins to work it out.”

  Marla grew still. “Work what out?”

  Carli wiped down the shelves with a paper towel. “Paige said the Durbins wanted time to say goodbye.”

  “Fuck the Durbins. And fuck Paige. Call her and tell her you want your baby now.”

  Carli put the paper towel into the bag and tied the top into a knot. “No.”

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Carli stood up and put the trash bag on the bed. She turned to Marla, looked her right in the eye, held her gaze. “I said no.” Her eyes burned, but she managed not to blink. She promised herself yet again, that no matter what, she wouldn’t turn into Marla. “Paige will work it out.”

  Jon

  Jon listened for Gail. Their bedroom door was closed, and he stood in front of it for several moments listening, but he heard nothing. He went downstairs. He listened for her footsteps as he loaded the dishwasher, and he listened for the creak of the hardwood after he came in from taking out the trash. After he filled a glass with ice and gin and splashed some tonic into it, he climbed the stairs and paused again near their bedroom door, listening. Nothing but silence.

  He drifted to his office, fired up his computer, and half-heartedly clicked through a dozen sites, looking for a different answer than the one that Paige had given when he called her back. He was searching for that wrinkle, that crease that always lay at the center of any intractable problem. But Paige assured him that the law landed squarely on the side of the birth mother. The law strained to keep families together, she said. He and Gail and Maya weren’t a family yet, she didn’t quite say. Dignity and respect. She wanted to come for Maya right away, but after some shouting, Paige made a phone call to Carli. When she called back, she agreed to noon the next day.

  They’d been through this too many times. Nothing quite like this, but every month after they started trying, started failing, really, they’d been through a version of this. He and Gail were wired so differently. Most of the time they compensated for each other, traded weaknesses for strengths. But having a baby proved different. If Jon had never said anything, they’d probably still be living on Paulina. Gail would be growing Tomassi Grinding during the week and shrinking her marathon times on the weekend. But he did say something, and once they started trying, once they started failing, Gail became obsessed. Her expectations would race ahead of her every time, even as the fear crept up Jon’s spine. But then they’d fail, and her disappointment, her grief, mapped to his silent, shameful relief. And every time, they shared the silence. Gail would climb under the covers and lay very still, and Jon would leave his banjo and guitar in their rack. Silence became their soundtrack.

  The silence, though, was better than the noise that would follow it. Gail would clean out the attic or rearrange the furniture in the living room or pack the children’s books away yet again. She’d do it loudly, aggressively, angrily. And the racket wouldn’t stop until he was stupid enough to say something—and eventually, he was always stupid enough to say something—usually something hopeful or encouraging even though he knew what that would get him. And then she would scream at him, he’d yell back, they’d fight, and then grow silent again. Every month in the beginning, when her period came, telling them that their efforts had amounted to nothing. Every six months when the sweet peas and prunes bled from her. That’s what she called them—sweet peas and prunes. Three times they endured that nightmare, but each time, things would ease back toward normal when she was ready to try again. He didn’t see any path back to normal this time, though, and he felt no relief. Maya wasn’t a sweet pea or a prune. Maya was their baby. This time, the silence sounded like a scream.

  When he was coding or playing banjo, he could always imagine what would come next. It didn’t always turn out exactly the way he expected, and the details were never sharp and clear, but he could always feel the general shape of it. He couldn’t imagine Gail handing the baby to Paige, and they couldn’t pack Maya into a basket and leave her on the doorstep with her things like a fairy tale in reverse. So that meant he’d be the one to hand her over. He could see the shape of that only too clearly, and the edges of that cut sharp. He couldn’t fathom the rest of it, though. Their lives after Maya remained unmapped. He couldn’t imagine what they would say, where they would stand, or how they would find each other. Not just the next day, but the next week and the next month and the next year. All of it a blank. Nothing.

  Jon drained the last of the gin. He thought about pouring another, but if the noise came tonight, he couldn’t afford to be drunk. He turned off the monitor and pushed himself up from the chair. When he opened their bedroom door, the small lamp on the dresser glowed, and Gail was curled up on her edge of the bed, facing the window. Jon went to the bassinet and leaned into it, inhaling the Milk Duds. Maya’s breath came even and quiet. Her head was turned to the side, and her fingers curled into a tiny fist. Jon kissed his own fingers and touched them lightly to her cheek.

  He turned off the lamp, stripped to his boxers and T-shirt, and climbed into bed. Gail didn’t stir, but she was awake, of course. Jon felt the need to say something, but with every moment that passed, words seemed more futile. Gail shifted, but only to pull the covers higher up over her face. There were no not-wrong words left. They lay there in silence for a long time. The words dignity and respect rattled around his brain. He shifted to Gail’s side of the bed and wrapped his arms around her. He needed to hold her to feel solid, to bear the silence. He kissed the back of her head and nuzzled his face into her hair. She murmured something that he couldn’t quite make out.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Her voice, when she spoke again, was loud and brittle. “I said don’t touch me.”

  Jon froze for a moment, struggling to process what she said, what she meant. Finally, he rolled back to his side of the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He lay still, unable to see the shape of anything, forced to endure the scream of the silence.

  Gail

  When Maya squawked awake, Gail climbed out of bed and pulled her from the bassinet. She sank into the armchair while Jon went to mix a bottle. Already Maya didn’t feel right in her arms, the weight of her just off, the shape somehow different. Jon returned and handed the bottle to Gail and then stood, arms awkwardly at his side, watching Gail feed her, his face screwed tight. When Maya finished, Jon took her into the nursery to change her without saying a word. Gail climbed under the covers and curled toward the window. She heard Jon lay Maya back into the bassinet, and he climbed into bed. He licked his lips, as if about to speak, but he spared her, spared himself her response. He tossed and turned for more than an hour, until he finally squirmed toward stillness. His breathing slowed and deepened. He would soon roll onto his back, and the snoring would begin. Not obnoxious cartoon snoring, just a quiet rumble on the inhale with a delicate snort at the end of the exhale that Gail used to find cute. Gail knew that she wouldn’t sleep. She wondered if she’d ever sleep again.

  Gail couldn’t stop thinking about the miscarriages. Until the phone call from Paige, the miscarriages were the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Every time, her lists had raced ahead of her body. Not just lists of things that they would have to do and buy over the next nine months, and the lists of the people they would tell and when they would tell them. Her mind raced beyond the birth, and she thought about names and toys and walking and talking. And she thought about siblings and how long to wait between each and how many and how to minimize the negative effects of birth order. She wondered about the difference between raising a boy and a girl. She tried not to hope for one or the other, because some things you just can’t control.

  What to Expect When You’re Expecting doesn’t tell you what to do when you stop. After each miscarriage, she worked hard not to think about it, not to dwell upon what might have been, what was supposed to be. She threw herself into her work, and she made lists about other things. Sometimes she
would go into the shop on the weekend and repair a boxful of blades. The muscle memory would return, and the steady strokes back and forth across the stone would help her mind go blessedly blank. After her second miscarriage, she ground several knives from scratch, because if she couldn’t make a baby, she felt like she had to make something. Back then, she did everything she could to keep her mind away from what had happened, but now, she was trying desperately to summon the memory of her miscarriages. Cindy bought her a book about grieving, and it told her to visualize her “safe and happy place,” like a waterfall or a meadow. Her mind always raced right past those safe and happy places, barely pausing, finding the pain, circling it, sniffing at it. The miscarriages were hard, but nothing like this. Her miscarriages felt soft and warm compared to this. Her miscarriages had become her safe and happy place. How messed up was that?

  She smelled Maya in the bassinet at the foot of the bed, but she smelled her even when she wasn’t in the same room. She smelled her on her shirt and on her hands and in the lining of her nose. That funky pear smell that was the way her baby smelled. Not just the way a baby smelled, but the way that Maya smelled. As she lay there, the fragrance became odor.

  A stray thought about the adoption book distracted her from the smell and even the miscarriages—but not in a good way, more like a rock in her shoe. Two extra copies lurked in the file cabinet in the office and they tugged at her. She had changed the book, right before Paige gave one to Carli, and she still had two extra copies. She had kept them, in case it didn’t work out with Carli, in case she needed them for the next situation. That’s what Paige called them: situations. Mothers who can’t raise their babies and barren couples marketing themselves to those mothers. Over the last four years, Gail had become increasingly obsessed with becoming a mother. But over the last few days something had shifted, and she didn’t realize it until she thought of those extra books. She didn’t need to be a mother, she needed to be Maya’s mother. Before Maya, she had been confident that when they adopted, love would wrap them with its tendrils and, over time, they would harden into sturdy roots that would bind them all. But she hadn’t grown to love her child, she’d fallen abruptly into love, like waking from a dream into a bright light. Or like a car crash. Another baby wouldn’t fill the gaping hole that Maya would leave in their life. Situations. Even that word wouldn’t be welcome in their home. It loomed too large, co-opted forever by Maya. There would be no more fucking situations.

  Jon had rolled to his back now, snoring as expected. Gail slipped out of bed and around the bassinet. She gave it a wide berth, refusing to look inside. She paused next to Jon, though. His face had relaxed into the softness of sleep. She wanted to touch him, to wake him, to say that she was sorry, but his face would just stiffen again, and he’d say words that she wasn’t ready to hear. Instead, she padded down the hall to the office. She shut the door and knelt down next to the file cabinet. She opened the bottom drawer, her drawer, the adoption drawer, and she pulled out the last two books.

  The covers were teal—Paige’s advice—to make them stand out. Gail opened one and scanned the first page. Dear Expectant Mother, Greetings from Gail and Jon. She studied the picture of the two of them, posed in the backyard in front of the flower garden. Jon had shaved that day—Gail had insisted. They leaned toward each other, and they both smiled in that openmouthed way that suggested the beginning of a laugh. Gail remembered her anxiety that day as she tried to arrange the perfect photo, but Jon must have said something funny right before the shutter clicked, because they both looked utterly and totally happy. She tried to imagine how an expectant mother might view Gail and Jon, how Carli must have seen that picture. She tried to imagine the circumstances that would allow them to smile like that again, and she failed. She tore the first page out. She powered up the shredder and fed it. She tore out the page with her extended family. What a nice grandmother that lady would make. She shredded it. She tore out the page with Jon’s extended family, complicated clusters of people forced into separate frames that the words in the book never really explained. She shredded it.

  It took her an hour to shred every page of both books. She took the teal covers down to the kitchen trash can and slid them beneath some garbage so that Jon wouldn’t find them, so that she wouldn’t have to talk about that. She didn’t go back upstairs, instead curling up under a blanket on the leather sofa in the den. At least she wouldn’t have those damn books tugging at her anymore. There would be no more situations. Gail pressed her nose to the fragrant leather, trying to smother the smell of her baby, and she tried to shove her attention back to the relative comfort of her miscarriages.

  Her mind, though, that wolf, wouldn’t sit still. It loped right past the miscarriages and sniffed at the bassinet that would soon be empty. It nuzzled the emptiness that felt so vast it might swallow her. It sprawled on the wide-open middle of their too-big bed. But as night melted toward dawn, the shape of a terrible possibility began to emerge.

  Jon

  Jon woke with the opening note of Maya’s first cry, and everything that happened the day before landed on him immediately. There was no blissful moment of ignorance, no confusion, no reprieve before reality returned. He woke with reality in the bassinet at the foot of his bed. Maya was howling by the time he plucked her from it. He held her to his shoulder and bounced her softly, shushing her. He glanced at his watch. He’d only slept for a couple of hours, but he was surprised to have slept at all. When his bleary eyes landed on Gail’s empty edge of the bed, he felt no surprise at all.

  Jon felt like he’d drift off if not for the weight of Maya in his arms. Even through his exhaustion, through the buzzing in his ears and the pounding headache, he knew that he wouldn’t get used to the idea of letting Maya go. He tried again to imagine their house without her, but he failed. He rubbed Maya’s fingers between his own. In seven short days, those fingers had kneaded his fear into expectation and then love. Those fingers had tricked him.

  As he carried Maya into the nursery to the changing table, his muddled dreams drifted back to him, but all he could remember was the blackness and the searching. As he changed Maya’s diaper, as he fitted her into a onesie, he felt again the terror of blindness, of not finding. When he picked up Maya and nuzzled the top of her head with his chin, it hit him. He hadn’t been searching for Maya in his dreams. It was Gail that he couldn’t find.

  Don’t touch me. Her voice was so cold when she said those words. Dead. The lifelessness of those words, more than the words themselves, had forced him back to his own edge of the bed without a word. All day yesterday, he’d been trying to sort through what it would mean to lose Maya. All day yesterday, he had grieved and prepared for the waves of grief to come. As he looked out the window at the redbud tree, he became certain in a way that made him cold all over again: he would lose Gail, too. He wasn’t sure how it would happen or how long it would take, but their bed wasn’t big enough. They would retreat again from the center, the house would go silent, and before too long he would look to her edge and find it permanently, terrifyingly empty.

  “Hey,” Gail said softly from the door of the nursery. “How is she?”

  Jon looked at Gail for a long time before answering. “Where’d you go?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Gail walked across the room and slumped into the rocking chair. Jon wondered how long she would stay after Maya was gone. Her shoulders sagged, and her eyes burned red from crying and lack of sleep. She held a full bottle, but when he brought Maya to her, she didn’t hold her arms out to take her. Instead, she just handed him the bottle. He took it and walked with Maya across the room. He leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. He slipped the nipple between Maya’s lips and she began to suckle. He stared at Maya’s face, studying it, memorizing the features, storing them for later. For forever. Yesterday, no tears came, but now his eyes began to fill.

  “When I talked to Paige last night—” Jon paused, but there was no delicate way to say the
unsayable. “She said that she’d come at noon. She thought that it was best if we did this quickly.”

  The room was silent but for the slurp as Maya tugged at the bottle. Jon looked out the window at the roof of the McKenna house. He looked at the turtle rug. He looked at the crib. He didn’t look at Gail. He held all the grief that he could hold in his arms. Later, after Maya was gone, he could begin to study Gail, memorize her. He could start preparing himself for that loss, too.

  “What does she know about what’s best?”

  A much less profane version of what Jon had asked Paige. Jon leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. “She made it clear that she wasn’t talking about us.”

  “What if we don’t?” Gail asked.

  “We have to, Gail.”

  “What if we go away?” Her voice came raw. “What if we take her?”

  Jon’s eyes clicked open. He stopped breathing. Holy shit. There it was. The wrinkle. The crease. From Gail. And she sounded serious.

  “Where?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Just leave?”

  “Yes.”

  Jon peered at her. Her jaw jutted like it did when she had made up her mind, and she stared right back at him. Holy shit. Jon’s mind was clearing, and the shape of what came next began to form, and he found himself leaning toward it, back toward Gail.

  “Could you really do that?” he asked.

  “I know that I can’t give her back. I try to imagine it, but I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “What about Carli?”

  Gail was quiet for a long time, and Maya’s breathing grew even louder. When Gail spoke, her words felt solid. “I can’t think about Carli.”

  “What about your family?”

  This time Gail didn’t hesitate. “Maya is my family.”